Prize winner Sparda-Bank Hannover Foundation Dirk Dietrich Hennig by Matthias Reichelt in: zug um zug 08, Hannover 2008 This year's prize from the Sparda-Bank Hannover Foundation was awarded to Dirk Dietrich Hennig, who has dealt with the biography of an artist from the last century in a complex and multi-layered work. With loving perfection and convincing presentation, Dirk Dietrich Hennig provides a detective-like insight into the life of a person who is in danger of losing himself due to an illness. Self-assurance in the form of photo and text documentation, notarized by the Bremen City Hall, is the patient's therapy against an unstoppably progressive illness, retrograde agnosia, which leads to the complete loss of short-term memory. For the purpose of orientation, the patient is forced to assure himself of his own everyday activities and thus of his existence in the form of documentation. Since this biographical chapter of the artist Jean Guillaume Ferrée, born in Lorquin, France in 1926, takes place in the 1970s, the documents correspond in their tactile aesthetic to that time and also show signs of an aging process. But nothing is as it seems. Dirk Dietrich Hennig tells a fictional story that he historicizes very convincingly in every detail, right down to the surface. The photos are fixed in landscape format to the DIN A4 sheets using eyelets in the appropriate archival aesthetic and are presented in a museum setting like "archaeological finds". Dirk Dietrich Hennig himself plays the role of the artist. He has invented a complex biography for the figure he portrays, which moves in a political-artistic context that he equips with meta-levels and supports with secondary sources. A complex puzzle of fiction and reality that the viewer must unravel and with which Hennig ironically refers to the myths of artists' biographies, the illusion of empiricism, cultural memory and total surveillance. Matthias Reichelt, Berlin 2008 © dirkdietrichhennig.com 2024